Au revoir, not à bientôt

I wrote this blog at East Midlands airport back in October while en route to France.  I didn't publish it at the time, as I thought I might be over-reacting. Another couple of months hasn't changed things however...in fact it's just solidified how I feel about things...

"I’m writing this waiting for my flight to Dinard-Pleurtuit-Saint-Malo. Over the last 10 years I’ve frequently travelled out to our house in Brittany at this time of year, sometimes for bike riding, more recently to mow the lawn one last time and generally prepare the place for the ravages of winter. Even if I’m just going out to do the domestics I normally feel a frisson of excitement once I’m at the airport. This year, not so much.

There’s a whole variety of reasons for that. Some are to do with the house itself - the burden of maintaining a large garden increasingly outweighs its pleasures. Covid, inevitably, plays a part too; aside from the temporary inconvenience of having to wear a mask for an extended period for the first time (though I’m partly getting round that by making this bottle of Coke last an unfeasibly long time), I’ll actually be spending quite a lot of the next week doing the day job - management consulting from anywhere is now possible in a way it just wasn’t this time last year - so it won’t feel like I’m on holiday. It will, in fact, feel like a normal week, but just one where I’m working at an inferior desk with inferior WiFi. 

But the point of this isn’t too moan about the first world problem of being well-rewarded for doing an interesting job from my second best house. It’s more to do with the changes Brexit will, finally, bring at the end of this year. As I write, Boris has advised M. Barnier that there’s only any point him going to London next week if he has something new to offer. That looks unlikely, given that the point of the EU’s negotiating strategy has always been to try to punish the U.K., pour encourager les autres. So a No Deal Brexit is looking likely, unless I’m being very naive and the whole thing is being stage-managed so that a last minute agreement can be presented as a triumph for both sides, depending on which side of the Channel you reside. [Update 21/12 - can't believe the last sentence remains valid at this point....] 

So the realities of a Britain outside the EU will bite, and the 4 1/2 years of wondering will end. It’ll mean quite a lot of change for us, all of it unwelcome. Getting our cat and dog into and out of France will become, without going into all the detail of what it means to be an ‘Unlisted’ country for pet travel purposes, hasslesome and expensive (to the tune of several hundred pounds a year in additional vet’s bills). [Actually the UK has been awarded "Part 2 status", not as bad as Unlisted, but not as good as Part 1, for which there is no good reason for it not to apply; another 'punishment']. We’ll be limited to spending 90 days out of any 180 in France, unless we apply for a visa - more hassle, knowing French bureaucracy, and probably another 90€ or so for my wife, who typically spends April to September across there.  We’ve always taken out travel/health insurance rather than rely on the EHIC, but were we to ever need treatment, no doubt that dreaded bureaucracy would rear its ugly head again.

All this comes, of course, on top of what you knowingly sign up to when you buy a property abroad - the local taxes and utility bills, the usual travel costs and maintenance jobs. Those things have felt manageable for the last 10 years, and while the new costs probably don’t add a huge percentage to the current bills, for me they contribute to a crossing of the rubicon.

I’ll come back to the role of Brexit in that, and how I feel about it, as a Leave voter and staunch supporter over the last 5 years. But France as a country plays a role too. When we bought out there in 2010, it felt like something of a nirvana; close, but with a whiff of the exotic, a lower cost of living, and in the rural parts at least relatively free of crime and social problems. The glorious countryside is unchanged of course, but the other things on my list aren’t, unfortunately. Part of that may be down to my greater familiarity with the place, but other parts are demonstrably different, as anyone who’s paid for a week’s grocery shopping can attest.  Living there, whether it’s the relatively new 80km/h A road speed limit, or the more visible rural poverty, just feels a little bit worse.  

So France has changed, and not for the better. Add my reduced enthusiasm for gardening, the continuing uncertainties of Covid, and Brexit-created difficulties, and I’m not ashamed to say I want out. The place is for sale. I feel slightly guilty about that; unlike my wife, who’s learned to speak good French and has a number of friends out there, I’ve never really integrated. Sure I smile a lot and ‘bonjour’ all the locals, but that only goes so far. So I have no ties other than to the results of all the work we’ve done to make it a nice place to be, but those feel like they're loosening quite quickly.

Back to Brexit. As I’ve described, its effects probably aren’t a dealbreaker in their own right, but they're the final nail in the coffin of my love for our Breton chez nous. I can feel the schadenfreude of some readers from here - “you voted for Brexit, you’ve defended it, you’ve even been selected as a candidate for Brexit Party, so own it”. Fair point. But je ne regrette rien.

To start with, there’s more to it than the pedantic observation that had I voted differently in 2016 it wouldn’t have made any difference to the result. But then, the approach of the EU to the UK since 2016 has confirmed my suspicions; what matters most to the EU, beyond everything else including the wealth and wellbeing of its citizens (as million of Greeks would agree), is the EU; the project itself. Nothing must get in its way, and any deviations from the plotted course must be punished mercilessly. 

I'm not interested in re-running Brexit arguments however; those about trade and whether we’ll be better or worse off particularly bore me, partly because they assume a set of conditions that almost certainly won’t apply forever or even for very long - we and our trading partners will adapt. Some doors will close, others will open. The arguments over the balance are academic; I don’t care about them.  And Covid's effects will dwarf them in any event.

I guess the acid test is whether I’d have voted differently in 2016 if I’d known that we were going to end up with what looks likely now. It’s hard to assess honestly and rationally of course. On balance, I think not. I might have paused to consider for longer, and I’d certainly prefer to avoid No Deal from a personal point of view, but the underlying fundamentals aren’t any different. And at the end of it all, if I was still in love with France and our little part of it, the post-Brexit hassles would be barely registering." 

21/12 update: I feel the same. It may take us some time to sell our houses of course, and part of me hopes that in any case it won't be until after the Tour de France passes our door at the end of June, assuming of course we're allowed into the country by then. But my clear ambition is to have cut our ties with the place by the end of 2021.  I feel sad, but philosophical about that. We've had some lovely times and a number of superb summers out there, so I certainly don't regret our buying decisions. But if this year has shown anything, it's that life can change quickly and unpredictably, and what matters in terms of our health and contentment is how we choose to react to it. Easier for some than others of course, but that's for another day...

All that remains to say is.....Happy Christmas, wherever you'll be and whatever you're doing.

Resist

It won't have escaped your notice that our freedoms have been significantly curtailed over recent months, without much scrutiny from either Parliament or mainstream media. Whether or not you think this justified to manage Covid (I don't), it's worrying because what's taken away by governments is rarely given back without a fight. It's easy to think there's nothing we, the little people, can do about this, with the full range of government, civil service, opposition, lots of the media, the police and so on apparently on the same side. I've thought that for a while. But this week I've had more time for thought than usual, being forced to rest for periods as I let a broken rib and bruised spleen mend from a silly domestic accident (messing around with the dog on the stairs). And I've realised there are little things we all can and should do to resist the insidious creep of control over our lives.  They might not win us the war, but they might buy us some time while opposition forces gather for a counter-attack.

So, here goes, here's the list. I'm not going to provide a full explanation for each of them, or I'd be here forever, but the theme that runs through them is how to get the state and large corporations - including badly/poorly regulated private ones to play a smaller part in our lives.

In rapid fire mode, here are the Covid ones:

1. Don't download the govt's Track & Trace app
2. Don't use any shops/restaurants that insist on you having it
3. Don't agree to having a vaccine if one becomes available in the next 2 years - it won't have been tested properly
4. Don't snitch on your neighbours or anyone else; not only is it bad form, but it's probably preventing us from developing herd immunity

I hesitate to say don't use masks. I loathe the damn things, partly because I think the evidence indicates they're counter-productive from an infection point of view, and partly because I think they're dehumanising. However, if wearing one helps keep small, local shops and restaurants in business, so be it. 

Here's the broader list, in no order of logic or significance whatsoever:

1. Pay cash wherever you can
2. Don't have a smartmeter - apart from not being transferable between suppliers, they'll probably be used to turn off supplies in future years when there's not enough power being generated because of our ill-advised reliance on renewables
3. Don't give to Big Charity - by which I mean organisations that either or both pay their boss more than £100k p.a. or get more than 50% of their funding from government. Give to small, local charities instead
4. Don't visibly support the NHS - venerate its employees if you must, believe in free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare, but don't be so narrow-minded as to assume that lots of countries don't have better delivery mechanisms with much better average outcomes; they do, and our viewing of the NHS as some kind of shining beacon is utterly bizarre. Demand better
5. Avoid tax, legally - only by minimising our tax bills will we shine a light on how much money the government both takes off us, and squanders. Use your ISA allowances, write everything legitimate off against tax if you have your own business, substitute pension contributions for salary to pay less income tax, and so on. Read the money pages of newspapers to learn what to do
6. But do pay your taxes and do your returns on time - don't give HMRC or any other authority an excuse to delve into your affairs
7. Don't think ID cards are ok, or subscribe to the "if I've done nothing wrong, I've nothing to worry about" school of thought. "Papers please" will be the next step, to do the most day-to-day of things
8. Don't pay for a TV licence
9. Don't invest in pension funds that buy government debt - tough to achieve that one, but if a job's worth doing
10. Don't complain about "things the government should do something about", but then through your actions support their continuation. Examples - don't buy at Primark if you think the conditions the clothes are made in are wrong; don't complain how much footballers are paid and then take out a Sky Sports subscription; don't moan about the fuel price at motorway service stations and then fail to plan your journey well enough to mean you can't avoid using them
11. Don't buy extended warranties on anything, ever. Complain if things break
12. Don't use illegal drugs - the knock on effects in terms of crime and anti-social affect you and your friends. Your cheeky line of coke or harmless spliff is not victimless
13. Use the mechanisms central and local government have deigned to create in order to demand feedback and action, e.g. petitions, pothole filling 
14. Don't buy into the Green agenda unquestioningly - who doesn't want a nicer, cleaner planet? But when unlikely bed partners exist, large landowners and eco-Marxists in this case, you should ask why and how much it's costing you
15. Pick litter
16. Don't see university as an automatic goal for your kids - they may end up smarter and richer taking a different route
17. Try not to buy stuff made in China - before you press 'buy now' on that bargain from Amazon, see where it's made
18. Avoid unconscious bias training, and anything labelled 'diversity' or 'inclusion'. If you can't avoid it at work, at least don't take it seriously. If you understand the development of Marxist thought and strategy over the last century, you'll know these are the vehicles for the subtle undermining of the societal pillars that have served us well till now...
19. But do treat everyone, regardless of any traits of race, sexuality, or any other innate feature, as you would wish to be treated yourself.  Straying from the point a bit with this one, so back to it:
20. Buy local if you afford to....butchers, bakers, candlestick makers...
21. Clearly differentiate in your mind before every purchase between things you need and things you want
22. Don't support the police unquestioningly, or at least their leadership. When it comes to public order policing, they've clearly taken sides. We will remember
23. Apply for a shotgun licence - if enough of us do, they might begin to wonder why and get worried

There are probably others, and I'd be pleased to hear them. 

Finally, as if it needs saying, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think there's some grand plan to undermine how we live. There's a multitude of explanations for why this is happening; weak politicians, careerist 'experts', bad risk assessment, wanting to seem virtuous, cowardice, money making scams. But as I said at the start, we can and should resist. Start with the list above. 

1981

I've not blogged much recently.  It's partly because I've been busy moving house in the UK, restoring our French gite to its pre-Covid neglect state, and working, but also because the world has become so mad and irrational I don't know what I can add that's novel or useful.

So instead I'm going to tell a personal story that has no moral or deep meaning, only occurred to me as I was applying decking oil this morning, but does show some of the unexpected connections life can throw up.  I'm going to take you back to the school summer holidays of 1981, when I was a slightly gauche, but sporty 14 year old. (As opposed to now, when I'm a slightly gauche, but sporty, 53 year old...)

It was the summer of Botham's Ashes and riots in the UK. Neither passed me by, but neither impinged on my life very much either. Every morning would see me doing my paper round, and I spent the rest of my time engaged in various other pursuits.  One of those was trainspotting.  Forgive me, I'm from Crewe, where you were an outcast if you weren't a trainspotter.  I spent many an hour over the summer of 1981 sitting on Platform 1 of Crewe railway station "classing my 87s" (translation: endeavouring to spot every member of a particular type of locomotive, and prove this by underlining the numbers in the Thompson trainspotters' bible). It was simple, cheap entertainment, of the sort I doubt many 14 year olds are interested in now.

I was three or four years into my appreciation of pop music too in 1981, obsessively recording chart positions in each week's Top 40.  In fact, I had a brief moment of fame when I noticed that no number 1 records whatsoever over a four year period had either entered the chart or had a stopoff at number 4 on its way to the top. I wrote to Mike Read with this pearl of wisdom, which he duly shared with the Radio 1 breakfast show audience. It's fair to say that friends and acquaintances were more impressed with my fleeting national fame than my chart insight. And a few others took great delight in trawling back through the record books to find previous number 1's that had had a week at number 4.  Anyway, the point is that a band called Depeche Mode first charted in the summer of 1981, so beginning a [to date] 39 year appreciation of that group by me, and through most of their genres.  They were the first concert I attended alone in 1983, and the band I think I've seen most often. And the only one with a bar dedicated to them in which I've drunk (in Riga, Latvia).

At the end of the summer of 1981, on one of the last days before the return to school, we had a family trip down to the Long Mynd valley near Church Stretton in Shropshire, one of several consecutive years we did so. I spent the day climbing the hills and building dams in the streams there. It was a blissful last hurrah before I went back to school to start my O Level courses, and more glamorously average two goals a game over the Cheshire inter-school football league season.

So, Crewe railway station, Depeche Mode, the glorious hills of Shropshire, all features of the summer of '81, and all, I realised this morning, ones I now have new ties to through my three children.

The least unexpected link is probably the one to Shropshire. My son lives in Shrewsbury, very close to those lovely hills, and who knows, the many walks he and I have done in them may have influenced him to choose that area in which to live.  I don't know, but it's great to have that link.

A more tenuous connection is the one to Depeche Mode.  My youngest daughter starts 'proper' work in October (following her old man into management consulting), but for the last year while she's been completing her Master's at Kings College London she's been dogwalking to pay her living expenses - taking the pampered pooches of Primrose Hill and Hampstead out for their daily constitutionals. One of her clients has been, and still is, Martin Gore - of Depeche Mode. She only mentioned this casually a few weeks ago, and was I think slightly taken aback by the enthusiasm of my response.  I doubt she's taken any notice of my beseeching of her to mention that bar in Riga to her client, and frankly, who can blame her?  But my daughter walking Martin Gore's dog?!?

On to Crewe railway station.  This one's been on the cards for a while given my eldest daugher's job with Network Rail, but it's happened - she's in charge of a project that's already started, and will culminate over Christmas this year when she'll take possession of the whole of Crewe station from Christmas Eve till early on the 27th December, to renew all the many dozens of signals that control the passage of trains through the busiest junction after Clapham. It's likely to be the highest profile railway closure over Christmas this year, and certainly the one with the potential to disrupt most passenger journeys given the number of lines that pass through Crewe.  George will be running a team of 80 engineers on a plan broken into 15 minute chunks for the 56 hours.  Makes the project management I've done in my career look truly amateur.

The thing that struck me this morning was the sheer unlikeliness of the combination of the above. I tried to imagine the reaction of that 14 year old sitting trainspotting in 1981 if someone had approached him and said "listen my lad, here's a prediction: you'll have three children. In 39 years time, the youngest will be on first name terms with a member of your favourite band, the middle one will live in and love your favourite place as much as you do, and the eldest will be in charge of renewing all the signals of the station you're sitting in".  I suspect the reaction actually would have been "I'm going to have children? Get outta here", or words to that effect, as that would have been confirmation I was going to attract members of the opposite sex, something that really didn't seem like a given at that point, despite my sporting prowess. 

As I said, nothing particularly remarkable, unusual or insightful in any of this; it's just funny how things work out sometimes, and fun to reflect on them. 

  

What did you do in the war Daddy?

Mea culpa. To anyone with a passing interest in or knowledge of political thought, what's been happening in a big way over the last seven or eight years, and for decades in a less mainstream way, is obvious. Antonio Gramsci's interpretation of Marxism, best encapsulated by Rudi Dutschke's phrase "the long march through the institutions", has really been happening. But I didn't particularly worry about it. That was partly because in the UK at least, every national ballot since 2010, whether election or referendum, has gone the 'right' way. I might not have directly supported every cause, but the results seemed the least worst outcome. But it was also because I thought the influence of the institutions was marginal. How wrong I was. The Right may be winning the electoral war, but the Left are winning the culture war by a much bigger margin.

The question is: what to do about it? The hackneyed Burkean quote around "evil triumphs when good men do nothing" is true. Don't misunderstand - I'm not literally saying the BBC, Black Lives Matter, The Guardian, trans-activists and so on are 'evil' - but they are motivated, consistent and determined to be disproportionately influential on our thinking and way of life, and a shrug of the shoulders and an air of amused detachment are no longer enough to hold back the tide. So I repeat - what to do about it?

More qualifiers so that you don't think I'm a crackpot conspiracy theorist...

- is everyone who works at the BBC a closet Gramscian? No.  But is there a clear agenda underpinning the vast majority of its current affairs and news coverage?  Yes, and this is true also of other broadcasters.
- do black lives matter? Of course they do. Is it true that in the US all the funds raised for Black Lives Matter seem to be secretly channelled to ActBlue, an organisation dedicated to funding the loonier, leftier end of the Democrats?  It looks that way.
- do trans people have the right to be treated with dignity and respect, just like - and in exactly the same way as - any other member of society? Of course. But does that mean we have to conflate that right with the automatic acceptance of post-modern gender theory, which asserts that anyone can be any gender they like merely by the act of self-identification? No. It's madness, and massively trivialises the challenges of those affected by genuine dysphoria.

These are just three examples. Given time, I could equally opine on dozens of other institutions, ranging from the National Trust, through to the police (seriously, don't get me started on the Common Purpose-schooled idiots who now seem to be in charge of most police forces), and even the private sector.  I doff my hat - the Left have been seriously skilled in taking just and righteous causes, and commandeering them for wider political purposes.  In terms of the influence on people's lives, I reckon them to be at least as successful, if not more so, than the elected governments we've had in the last ten years.

Why do I mind? I think it comes down to two things:

First, I'm a rationalist and an empiricist. I distrust ideologies, as they all, left through right, disregard or gloss over the impact of human psychology. (Even the subject in which I'm most qualified - economics - is, excuse my language, largely bollocks as it's largely based the notion of the rational consumer. It's why behavioural economics is a much more interesting and insightful field). Anyway, the post-modern underpinnings of the influences on the institutions I now distrust explicitly reject rationalism and empiricism - narrative is all, and narrative becomes the reality, even if it is clearly contrary to the majority's observed truth. This explains why the BBC would run the now-notorious headline last weekend "27 police officers hurt in largely peaceful BLM demo." 

Second, because the execution of these ideologies seeks to subvert, or at least sidestep, democratic processes. The Left realised long ago that, to use the words of Alan Johnson to Jon Lansmann on the last election night in December, the working class "have always been a big disappointment", what with their tiresome attachment to notions of family, community and country, and so unlikely to provide electoral success to truly left wing politics. So they've sought other methods to dominate 'discourse', and as I say they've done it very well.  Though it's helped that the Right has sought to appease, rather than challenge head-on.

It feels like the scales have tipped this week however.  Maybe it's just the perfect storm of the events in America, the consequences of lockdown on people's psyche, and some good weather, and it'll all blow over. But this time feels different, and to use an ucky phrase, we need a more assertive counter-narrative.  It'll be hard to pitch it right without appearing to be against fairness and justice. The bigger question though is who's going to do it?

Which brings me back to the central question - what do WE do? I have no influence.  What's true, however, is that there are people who 'get' this, across the political spectrum.  There are sane, articulate and balanced voices on the left (Paul Embery, Maurice Glasman and other Blue Labour types) that I like and trust far more than most Tory MPs. Economic left vs. right is irrelevant at this stage, especially post-Covid. It's the cultural left vs. the cultural right that matters.  I believe those of us on the cultural right need to identify and swing behind the people who don't hold political power at the moment (they appear to be the appeasers of the cultural left anyway), but can speak for us. They may be academics, trade unionists, authors, comedians, I don't care. But in the short term we need to give them a bigger voice.

I've other ideas too, but they can wait for another day...

Calling small business owners....

There was a choice of potential topics for this post.  Top of the list initially was an examination of what 'deprived' or 'discrimination' really mean, but then I decided that even with my limited audience that was probably too incendiary. So I switched back to safer, work-based topics, and thought about taking apart the phrase 'customer journey', which isn't a new one, but still irritates me now as much as when I first heard it, mainly because of its innate inaccuracy, as well as its general corporate-bull***t-ness.

However, I'm going to talk about banking, and business banking in particular. UK clearing banks, in common with many others round the world, have had a rough time in public perception in recent years, mainly through their own actions it has to be acknowledged. And yet banking, done well, is a critical component of healthy, functioning and growing economy.  While God may hate the sin but the love the sinner, it's the other way round in banking - we may and do hate the sinners (bankers), but we need to love the sin (banking), because recycling capital to lend it out multiple times over is to an economy what lungs are to a body.

So we should want banks to succeed, albeit not too much, and certainly not if we suspect there's an uncompetitive market (and for the record, I think the UK market is uncompetitive, but mainly because the barriers to entry are so high, rather than there being any player collusion). However, with recent events it's going to be increasingly difficult for them to succeed. Until now, as long as there weren't any own goals like PPI, and credit policies were reasonably prudent, it was fairly easy to make a profit through what's called NII (net interest income, i.e. the difference between what's paid in deposits and received on lending). But with interest rates now at their super-low levels because of the response to Covid-19, that just got a lot harder.

That comes at a time too when other circumstances, again because of Covid, also changed for the worse. Expectations will be higher because of the role they'll need to play in rejuvenating the economy, and at the same time the effects of the government's business loan schemes will be feeding through - and while any losses will be covered by the UK Treasury, it'll be up to the banks, as things stand, to undertake the administration and management of any loans that aren't repaid - which will be a huge logistical, and therefore costly, challenge. You can see how all this will become a recipe for making large and sustained losses (and I haven't even mentioned the loans that will go bad in the 'regular' lending portfolio as a result of Covid).

And this is where it begins to get a bit personal, as it's looking strongly like my next assignment will be to spend a couple of months working out how to avert the kind of poor performance that currently seems to be on the cards for the business banking part of a large UK bank. I won't be doing that alone of course; it's likely there'll be a team of three of us, but still, it's quite a big topic for a small team to get to grips with in a relatively short period.

We've already got our terms of reference for the work, so we know very roughly the questions the client will expect us to be able to answer. And yes, some of it will undoubtedly involve cost cutting - but not all of it. For the first time in a while, it looks like we'll be given the scope to think about where business banking might find more income. That's been a verboten question in recent times as a result of the mis-selling scandals, but these crazy times seem to have put it back on the agenda. We'll have our ideas, but comments and responses to this would be most welcome from any small business owners, or people with experience in the sector, particularly to questions that include:

- With what types of organisation do you spend money on financial services other than clearing banks?  Why?  What circumstances would persuade you to switch that spend to your bank?

- Would you trust your clearing bank to provide accountancy-type services as part of your response to HMRC's Making Tax Digital project?

- Have you wanted to buy any product or service online from a clearing bank, but found that wasn't possible? What was it?  How did you eventually source that product or service?

- Are there any non-traditional financial products or services (e.g. payroll) that you would consider buying through your bank?

Any comments on the quality of your internet banking app would also be gratefully received.

To conclude, and reflecting on all that, it's a funny old job, being a consultant. I know we have the image of being smooth-talking, jargon-wielding, smart suit-wearing, too-clever-by-half idiots hired only to tell clients what time it says on their wristwatch, but I don't feel like I tick any of those boxes. (Well, maybe one - sometimes the client has only just learned to tell the time, and he/she's grateful for confirmation that it's definitely five to midnight). More of the time, at least in my case, it feels like I'm there to clear up other people's messes. In the forthcoming work, it's not the bank's fault - it's down to whoever you choose to blame Covid on. Previously, it has been bank staff, software suppliers, organisational culture, and a whole load of other things. Being external gives you a liberating freedom to speak truth, sensitively, and recommend tough things. Do we provide insights and choices that the client couldn't have worked out for themselves? Rarely.  Do we generate discussions and decisions that just wouldn't have happened had we not been around?  Frequently.

Assessing Risk

My two most recent professional assignments, both undertaken and completed this year, have concerned 'risk'. The first was assessing at how well the major bank for whom I do a lot of my consultancy work manages its outsourcing arrangements, and particularly the wrapper of 'risk management' (I used the inverted commas advisedly) it puts around them. The second was assessing how well the same organisation's 'Three Lines of Defence' risk model works, whether some of its participants are in fact located in the right place from an organisational design point of view, and building consensus around a new risk operating model that I designed.

Well done if you're still reading, for that all sounds pretty dry, does it not? It probably is, but every time I come into contact with anything labelled 'risk' in my professional world, it convinces me more of two things: first, that while many people can effectively identify a 'risk', they can be quite bad at quantifying it, and even less effective assessing whether it's an acceptable risk to take when compared to the likely benefits that will accrue. Second, and this is more applicable to work situations than non-work circumstances, I see a lot of people who think that the application of a process to risk assessment will in and of itself mitigate the underlying risk, rather than any resultant action. This can be very dangerous, because it persuades people that a risk has been taken care of, and therefore that they can turn off their own critical faculties.

I should state now, lest you think that I'm some kind of Health & Safety nutter, that that's absolutely not the case. But nor am I some kind of rule- and circumstance-ignoring maverick. I find both extremes irritating; the former is the local authority that might decree, for example, that hanging baskets are no longer to be allowed on a high street because of the alleged risk they pose to passers-by, while the latter is the motorway driver who ploughs on at 70 mph even in thick fog or driving snow.  In one case, the miniscule level of risk is unjustifiably used as the reason for the removal of a great pleasure giver, and in the other the benefit of arriving at one's destination a few minutes earlier does not justify the hugely increased risk of driving inappropriately.

I guess both of those examples fall into the first of the two things I see at work - that people can be bad at quantifying risk and even worse at offsetting it against benefits or downsides. My second observation is more nuanced - that putting a process round risk assessment can actually worsen a situation. This came to light on the outsourcing work I did earlier this year - to cut a long story short one of the 'supplier management' processes that those managing the outsource in question had to adhere to was to ensure that the supplier had a business continuity plan in place, so that if they were hit with an unexpected event they could still provide the bank with the contracted service. The supplier managers ticked the appropriate boxes in every case, to indicate that yes, their suppliers did indeed have such a plan, and that they'd witnessed it with their own eyes. However, a few cases has arisen where suppliers had hit problems, and their service had been interrupted. Their business continuity plan had failed. When the inevitable inquest took place, it turned out, to put it simply, that because the internal process didn't require supplier managers to assess the likely effectiveness of that continuity plan, they hadn't done; as long as they did what the process said, they weren't going to get fired or disciplined, regardless of any detrimental business outcome. Crazy process, crazy design (and crazy reward system, but that's a different issue), because it allowed them not to have to think about the real risk.

Now, I'm not going to claim that my risk assessment abilities are perfect, or even very good. I've no idea really, But I know that I at least think about these things. Let's take two contrasting examples, one of which might paint me as a risk-averse paranoid, and the other as an idiot with a death wish. The former applies when I'm using the Tube in London, which I do a lot when I'm working there, and normally at rush hour. At those times, I'm acutely aware that it would only take one unhinged person to pick on me and push me in front of an oncoming train to end my life. The number of times it actually happens each year is thankfully minimal, but happen it does. So I never stand facing the track; I stand sideways at a platform end, so I can see everyone around me. And neither do I listen to music or take calls; I want my wits about me. The risk of the negative thing occurring might be very small, but the cost of me taking what I consider to be sensible precautions is very low to zero, so why wouldn't I?

By contrast, it's inherently a lot more risky, measured in terms of probability multiplied by effect, of me riding my bicycle down mountains quickly. All it would take is one small misjudgement by me or potentially others, or one unseen patch of gravel, and I would be off and probably seriously hurt. The odds of that happening are probably much higher than being pushed under a Tube train. But I take the chance. Why? Because I estimate the rewards to be great - the adrenalin, the rush, the feeling of needing to deploy skill and experience to stay well. Some might say my approach is inconsistent, but I'd argue not - it's logical to minimise even small risks if there's no cost to doing so, and it's equally logical to incur a degree of risk if the rewards are great.

These are things I'm not sure are well understood. That's certainly how I feel when I look at some of the reactions to where we currently are with Covid-19. Let's take the education unions' objections to schools re-opening next week. I'm going to assume good faith on their part rather than any political motive (perish the thought), and take their objections at face value. But let's look at the facts - for the children certainly, and probably most teachers under 40, the chances of catching the virus at all are increasingly slim, and the chances of any infection resulting in a serious case are very small. By contrast, the cost of having kids at home not being educated, the effect on their development, education and socialisation, and the opportunity cost of their parents having to find childcare, is very great. There is clearly a strong case for schools to return; the danger to children is negligible. I would have some sympathy with the unions' position if it were more nuanced. If I were an overweight male teacher in my late 50s - and especially if I had diabetes - I'd be quite worried about going back into school, and I'd expect both the education authority and my union to be working to protect me. But I've seen no hint from either side that they're differentiating like that between teaching staff - there's either a 'risk' or there isn't in their view, which is just not true. It's an unintelligent way of looking at risk.

Similarly, and on a wider scale, it was evident right from the start of the coronavirus episode that there were groups who were massively vulnerable, and others who weren't. But instead of isolating one group and encouraging the other to continue life as usual, but with some sensible precautions, we closed down and locked up whole economies on the basis of risk assessment, driven by apparently horribly flawed modelling. I'm getting into a different subject now, so I'll stop, but I think there's going to be a strong case to look at the decisions Japan took at the outset, and the risk assessments upon which they were based. My sense is - and this is the point of this post I suppose - that they approached their risk assessments, and the subsequent political decisions in a very much better way than lots of other countries, and we should learn from that.

Prediction time - a revolution at work

I'm a management consultant in banking and financial services when I'm not being grumpy on Twitter, posting photos of the fine county of Cheshire on Facebook, or uploading exercise to Strava. My work brings me into frequent contact with Board members of a couple of the largest UK banks, including at the moment. And I think we might be seeing the stirrings of a revolution in how large, private sector organisations operate, directly as a result of CV19. I'll explain my reasoning, partly so I can look back in two years or whenever and either admit I got it hopelessly wrong, or be smug about my crystal ball...

So, coronavirus, CV19; when lockdown came the banks pretty much emptied all their head office-type buildings and functions. Employees were instantly told to work from home, and the vast, vast majority have not been back to their desks since. (Indeed, I've been told second-hand that when one of the banks that I don't work with asked if anybody wished to return to their desks at Canary Work when lockdown was eased slightly, not one of the 3,000 employees volunteered. And I know for certain that not even Board members have been into one bank's Gresham Street head office). Branch opening times have been reduced to four hours a day in many cases, and call centres have operated with skeleton staffing, again with many people being set up to work from home, where previously that simply wasn't an option for them.

In the first couple of weeks there were a few wobbles. Some people had to be given remote access to their organisation's systems, which isn't always straightforward given the security wrappers that are put round bank technologies these days. I know for certain that there was, and continues to be, major worries about the overall credit quality of the lending book, particularly for small and medium businesses. And the executives that run those businesses are particularly nervous, as they've been forced into providing Business Bounceback Loans, which although are government-backed, still fall under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority, who hold the senior managers of banks personally liable these days (through something called the Senior Managers Regime, introduced after 2008) for any wrongdoing - which includes lending to people or firms who are unlikely to be able to repay, which may well be the case for the Bounceback Loans. Plus, those same executives have been working even longer hours, and under even more pressure - probably unsustainably so - than BC (Before Covid).

Despite all the above, two major things have happened. First, despite the wobbles and the panics in the early days, the businesses have pretty much carried on functioning. Yes, there's been some criticism that some banks have been slow to pay out some loans, but by-and-large branches have still opened, internet banking has stayed available, phones have still been answered, and cashpoints have been full of notes. The banks have also had to absorb massively increased levels of phone traffic too, and individuals and small businesses have understandably flooded them with requests for payment holidays or other advice. Some days have been five, six times busier than the equivalent day last year, at a time when, as I've said, much activity has been transferred to 23 year olds working from their one-bed flats. It's been a truly remarkable achievement, and one that will get little attention or acclaim.

But for me, as a consultant, that's not the most significant or most interesting of the two big things that have happened. That is the fact that huge swathes of those people in the head office-type jobs have not been very busy, and that their lack of activity hasn't inhibited the running of the firm. This has been a hobby horse of mine for a while now - the fact that once an organisation reaches a certain size - I would estimate in the 5,000-10,000 employee range in the private sector - significant numbers of "non-jobs" are created. It's hard to define exactly what a "non-job" is, other that one that creates no discernible value, defined in terms of either generating revenue, managing or saving cost, or keeping the organisation safe from a legal or regulatory point of view. But after a while you tend to be able to spot a non-job holder quite easily.

These non-jobs have been created for a variety of reasons over the years. The three most popular in banking have been a) the 'spans of control' approach, which has set ratios for the number of people each manager has to have as direct reports, leading to jobs being created just to meet the ratio and thereby help secure their grade; b) a huge over-reaction to the events of 2008 leading to very fat 'Risk' departments (where few people actually understand genuine risk, but they sure have a fine list of forms that need to be filled in before anything can actually be done; and c) the fact that the organisations have been so big that the people at the top simply have no conception what thousands of their employees actually do, day in, day out. (I proved this to my satisfaction four years ago when I spent a month physically drawing out every department in every division of a large clearing back on twenty square metres of the CEO's dining room wall, and adding selected metrics for each one [number of people, average salary etc]. "The Wall", as it became known, stayed there for several months, during which time every executive and some non-exec directors visited it, and to a person expressed that it gave them insight into the company they'd just never previously had. Other than for their part of the business, they simply didn't know who did what, where, and what it cost beyond a headline figure).

Anyway, CV19 is beginning to shine a light on these non-jobs. They've been under-employed: the committees they support with their myriad Powerpoints haven't met as decisions have been escalated up the organisation much more quickly; the meetings that fill their diaries haven't been needed as a result - and the world hasn't stopped turning, something the people at the top have noticed.

Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to posit that it's only in the long term that the effects of the lack of activity of middle managers are likely to be felt. You could argue quite plausibly that the BC networks of information gathering and transmission that feed critical and strategic decisions are supporting what's going on now, and as they wither so the quality of future management decisions will deteriorate. I don't buy that - information is frequently sifted, refined and presented in such do-my-career-no-damage ways as to become practically meaningless. And if it's not diluted like that, it's bound up in 84 page presentations that simultaneously serve to both justify the existence of the author, and scramble the mind of the recipient, likely a senior decision taker.

I don't think I'm describing anything that the execs haven't known for themselves in their hearts. But these people have been their insurance policy, their don't-go-to-jail card, and I suspect that they'd probably prefer to keep them in place if they could. But after CV19 the world is going to be a very different place, one where they will be under immense pressure to cut costs, and the traditional approach of everyone finding 10% just isn't going to be enough. They're going to have to be radical, and they now know the uncomfortable truth that they employ lots of people that they don't really need.

So my prediction is that we're going to see huge swathes of redundancies in banking, but not from the sources of headcount reductions over the last decade like branches and call centres, but from the functions that have been growth areas in recent times - risk, chief operating office, transformation and related functions. (We'll also see branches stay at their current levels of service, and call centre numbers shrunk further, as everything goes online, but that's for another day).

And why would banking be any different from other industries dominated by large firms? It may have a greater risk management component than elsewhere, but my strong suspicion is that many sizeable operations will have been shocked at just how few people it takes to keep the show on the road. Not everyone with a non-job will be fired; I'm sure some will be transferred to more productive roles, but plenty will be shown the door. So while journalists and business writers are speculating on the long term possibilities of working from the home, the impact that will have on organisational culture, and the usage and rental yields of commercial property and so on, I sense that the real story might be an entirely different one - the fact that the virus has illustrated very starkly that there's a vast number of people being employed on very comfortable salaries (I'm talking in the £40k - £80k range, and more in London), who just don't need to be. Stand by for lots of middle class unemployment. 

New name, new style

Welcome to my updated blog title and style. It was time to move on, update things a bit. "Monmarduman" was never that catchy, and nine years on from its coining, it's a bit meaningless. In any case, the word was all to do with a variety and cycling and running challenges, and my subject matter's moved on and diversified a bit since then.

My themes are chosen at random, and are pretty much based on whatever seems worthy of comment, or personal stories of interest, at the point in time I write them. Something that I think I'm going to drop in now and again, however, is insight into the industry in which I do my consulting - banking and financial services. That sounds like it'll be about as interesting as watching the proverbial paint dry, but I've seen (and still see) some pretty hair-raising things, which I'll attempt to recount within the boundaries of not excluding myself from ever working again...

In the meantime, I'm going to reproduce a passage written by Lionel Shriver in the 18 April edition of The Spectator, for it captures exactly what I had in mind in renaming this blog:

"I am a type. I don't like groups. I maintain few memberships. I question and resist authority, especially enforcement of rules for the rules' sake. I'm leery of orthodoxy. I hold back from shared cultural enthusiasms.  Everybody's met such obstreperous specimens - and some readers out there are just like me....We don't joyously belt out national anthems, and recently, to popular disgust, many of us curmudgeons don't lean out our windows every Thursday at 8 p.m. to clap for the NHS".

To my own disappointment, I'm not as publicly rebellious as Lionel. I do mine more quietly. But I don't clap the NHS. Nor do I wear a poppy in November, celebrate VE Day or burst to get Christmas decorations up. I don't like music festivals, religious gatherings or any other acts of mass worship. They unsettle me. Formal occasions bring out the 12 year old in me - when my youngest graduated at Oxford most of the degree awards ceremony was in Latin, which I couldn't help but provide an idiotic translation for my party. The same is true at weddings and funerals - the former depress me and the latter make me want to crack jokes.  I hate any kind of orchestrated jollity.  Parties leave me cold.

I'm sure some of this is down to the simple fact of being an introvert (though work and life has forced me, like so many other introverts, to develop an extrovert front).  But some of the rest of it could be down to one or more of: personality failings; a strong sense that I need no help when it comes to determining what's moral (or not); and an undoubtedly arrogant belief in my analytical abilities.

I probably wouldn't choose the words in the last couple of paragraphs if I were entering my details on an online dating website. Fortunately, those days are over, so instead I can use my darker side to being interesting on here (hopefully), and beginning to discuss things - particularly in and from my professional world, as I say - that previously I haven't. Let's see how it goes.

Coronavirus Diary

Normally, I write to be read by others, and while of course I'm delighted you're reading this, today's words are more intended for me to look back on in the future. Because what we're living through is so extraordinary, so unprecedented, that I want some record of how strange it felt. I also want to have a punt at guessing some of the things happening now that we'll look back at as acts of madness.

Normally at this time of year, at least for the last few years, both me and the missus would be in France. We normally go out to our house there at the end of March/start of April, and spend a pretty intensive month mowing, digging, planting, pruning, power washing, painting, airing and cleaning to get the place looking good after a winter unattended.

It's not all work of course. Life out there settles into a pretty agreeable routine of dog walking (one early morning long, two short ones each day), exercise, garden and house chores, at least one beach or coast path walk each week, a meal out, homemade pizzas and fizz on Friday nights, homemade curry on Saturday nights, and the missus off to a vide grenier ("empty loft", or a car boot) or two on Sunday mornings. If that sounds banal, it is. Conversation can get no more exciting than whether the lights on the wind turbines we can see from our windows have turned from red (night time) to white (daytime) yet, or whether Raymond (84 year old farmer-widower-neighbour) has trundled off to market yet. But it's all immensely relaxing for the most part, and it has its rewards. Here's an example (the view from the back door):

There's none of that this year of course. Goodness knows what the place looks like, but one this that's certain is that it won't look like the pic above. And neither will the veg plot be as pristine as this, nor the grass as short:

But hey ho, it's hardly the biggest problem in the world. We started from scratch in 2015, and we'll do so again. I just hope we can get back there in the second half of June so that we can at least harvest some of the blackcurrant crop.

At the moment, however, we're both at home in Macclesfield. We're among the lucky ones - we're both working, we're healthy, we have outdoor space and great walking both from the front door and within a very short drive for properly spectacular hills and countryside.  Day-to-day life, particularly the working at home bit, gets a bit repetitive and claustrophobic intermittently, but on the other hand getting up early and getting dressed properly helps maintain an important sense of routine and order.

For us, there are some good things to come out of this lockdown. Zoom and Microsoft Teams have been a boon to us, as for so many others. I find audio-only conference calls at work really unsatisfactory, but adding video transforms the experience.  I'm hoping that the realisation that we can be effective from home endures as life gets back to normal, and the 3-4 days a week I spend in London when I'm working can become 1-2. Less London (and its transport systems), less time in air-conditioned offices, and more nights in my own bed would make continuing to work generally much more tolerable.

Another good thing is that because seeing family is currently impossible, we seem to be making more effort to use technology that properly keeps us in touch - FaceTime in particular is great for that. We're also lucky in that we exist in some great communities, virtual and otherwise. Every Friday from 5 till 6.30 it's the missus' Head of IT doing a DJ set from his Manchester flat, every Saturday from 3 till 4 one of our neighbours hauls his Marshall speakers into the back garden for an hour of 'Uplifting Classics' which everyone round and about seems to enjoy, and there's been online quizzes, yoga and Zoom 'virtual background' competitions.

That's all lovely, but we're very lucky. If we had school age kids to try to entertain and educate, or if we had no outside space, or if our income had dried up, life would, I suspect, feel even harder and more unforgiving at the moment than it does usually.

But there are plenty of aspects of this lockdown that feel bad for everybody, and we'll maybe come back to look at as madnesses of the period, including....

The Police - they seem to be on a mission to break the policing-by-consent model. They've allowed the perception to grow that they a) find it easier to fine and boss-around generally law-abiding people than go after the difficult, awkward cases, which their approach to policing lockdown has reiforced; b) have a role to play in "making society fairer". They probably do, but it lies in ensuring that victims and perpetrators of crime are treated equally, regardless of cause, class or income, rather than pathetic virtue-signalling about how much they care about 'social justice'. Their weekly homage to the NHS is particularly excreable.

Talking of which...the slogan "Protect the NHS". I understand the reasons for this, I do, we don't want the health service overwhelmed, we need to manage the peak, blah blah, but the back-to-front nature of a key government message, if you take a step back, is astounding. The NHS should be there to protect us, and the fact that it wasn't ready to do so must surely represent a massive failure of planning and management. Even worse, the "protect the NHS" message has been taken to heart so literally by the masses that not only are the diagnoses of cancer down from c.30,000 a month to closer to 5,000, but A&E admissions for heart attacks and strokes are much reduced. I have a strong suspicion that when the stats are compiled we'll find that for every CV19 death we saved through hospitals not being overwhelmed, there were two others from late/no diagnoses and lack of timely treatment. But hey, the TV cameras won't be there to record those, so it'll be a much smaller political issue, and the government and its advisors will have been seen to have done ok.

And on that note, the uniformity of the instructions to the public has again seemed nonsensical to me. It's as though people are incapable of understanding more than one childishly simple piece of advice. Maybe they are, but I don't think so. This is what I'd have said:

- regardless of what the stats are around infection rates, country comparisons, it's clear that the vast majority of young people will escape unscathed if they get CV19, and the vast majority of the elderly and those with serious health conditions are at great risk from it.
- so, if you're under 50 with no health conditions, go about life as normal, but when you're in public, wear a mask and keep your distance from others (as well as plenty of hand washing an no face touching)
- if you're 50 to 70 and generally fit you might want to be a bit more careful. Carry on as per the under 50s, but don't mix with anyone outside of your immediate family.
- if you're over 70 and/or have a serious health condition, be bloody careful. Stay at home, don't mix with anyone. And we'll mobilise to bring you everything you need. (It seems lunatic to me, for example, that over-70s have been going to supermarkets because they haven't been able to get delivery slots, while under-50s have been allowed to continue to receive their groceries at home; that's fine if all the oldies are taken of, but direct capacity there in the first instance.

I'd have shut all the places where people come into contact as a matter as course - pubs, restaurants etc. - but to have garden centres, council tips and loads of other businesses closed as a matter of course regardless of their staffing or customer profile seems wantonly destructive to me.

But then it's all about political perceptions and the fact that most people are incredibly bad at understanding and assessing true risk. Not only do they not get the right way to quantify and compare risks is to compare their impacts with the probability of each event occurring, but even more subtly (and this is illustrated by the cancer diagnosis point above), it's possible that by focusing on a single risk and minimising it as much as possible, you actually increase the overall risk load by other risks becoming more likely.  Aside from probability theory in statistics, formal education doesn't really get close to touching this stuff, and it should. Not only would it increase the chances of having a more sophisticated electorate, less susceptible to media scare stories but it would also have an impact on how people manage their finances and take significant life decisions. I won't be holding my breath though.

Well that was a bit of a journey, from my back garden in France to what should the on the national curriculum. I'll stop there, with the hope that I'll be able to look back and read this in 2025 with the world sort-of back to normal.

Lose Yourself

After a bit of a drought, I'm raining blog posts at the moment. There's not much else to do, frankly. I can only sit in the sun and walk the dog for so long. But one of the things I am doing is getting some exercise early each morning; it's what I do even in normal times, and it feels even more important in these abnormal times.

When the weather's good, most runs or rides can be classified with the unimaginative adjectives 'nice' or 'good'. Occasionally they might achieve a notch up on the superlative scale - 'energising' or 'excellent' perhaps. Even less often they're elevated further - and a single adjective is inadequate for those, though if forced to choose one with a gun to my head, I might go for 'fantastic', or even - pass the sickbag - 'life-affirming'.

Today was one of those times. I was out for 74 minutes, and probably only 6 of those minutes made it into that top category (though the rest were definitely 'excellent'). But those 6 minutes - goodness me - what a difference they make to everything. I want to try to describe the feeling. In my case - and if you needed a sick bag for the last paragraph you may need a sick bucket for this one - it's a combination of a sense that at that moment there is literally nothing else you would rather be doing and nowhere else you'd rather be, a surge of elation, and a feeling that you're totally at the top of your game.

I get that feeling in two circumstances. Or one, depending on your point of view. They are descending big mountains very quickly on a bicycle, and descending hills or mountains on foot (running) on difficult terrain. And with the latter, I'm normally listening to music. (No chance of that on the bike; there are too many things trying to kill you [other road users, cattle, sheep, gravel, blow outs, your own misjudgment] to justify cutting off a vital sense).

Take this morning for example. The 6 minutes of delight came after I'd climbed up to the telecomms tower on Croker Hill / Sutton Common. From there you can look west across the whole of Cheshire and into North Wales, and east across the hills of the Peak District. It's fabulous, even if the spot itself has got a slight Cold War feel to it:

From there, I started the descent home. I had 'Nothing Else Matters' by Metallica on Spotify, I'd just seen a herd of 40 deer leaping hedges, the sun was rising over Shutlingsloe (the Matterhorn of East Cheshire don't you know), and I was dancing over the deep ruts of the dried out pasture with a lightness of foot that had appeared miraculously from somewhere. For those 6 minutes, I was in another zone; deep concentration so that I didn't turn an ankle, but still with an intense appreciation of my surroundings. It was fabulous and zen-like.

As I say, swooping descents off Pyrenean - for the most part - mountains are the other occasions when that same feeling creeps up on me. The only other times I can recall it are from when I used to row - when a rowing eight finally manages to achieve perfect timing, with blades all entering and exiting the water simultaneously and the boat perfectly balanced, that's pretty amazing too.

What I'm left with a few hours after this morning's run is the wish, or hope, that everyone could feel something similar to what I've been describing, even if only occasionally (it doesn't happen more than 2 or 3 times a year in my case). It feels transformative; de-aging, restorative, strengthening. Although my examples are all athletically-related, that's just my preference. I imagine the same feeling could be achieved through singing in a choir, playing in a band, dancing, or building or making something. I think it probably has to be active rather than passive - listening to a piece of music that you love may be transporting, but it hasn't got that element of personal input that feels so vital.

I think that's the point of this piece; if you haven't got something in your life that hasn't got the potential to create what I've tried to relate, try to find it. You'll forget your worries, you'll realise the inconsequentiality of much of what surrounds us, and you'll enhance your insight into what really matters. Go for it - that's my deep and meaningful Easter message.

Post-Covid Free Market Changes

I'm an unashamed believer in free markets, free trade and the power of capitalism to lift people the world over out of capitalism.  I think the case for all those things is beyond doubt empirically. 

But that doesn't mean that I think there's not a role for the state generally, and when appropriate, to regulate markets.  And when we get through Covid-19 and its hideous economic impacts, I think there's going to be a case for some fairly radical government interventions as part of the settlement with the UK population. A reset. Some measures to make things feel a bit fairer.

I've got three in mind. Here's a quick trot through them....

1. Curb executive pay by placing a limit on the multiple of what they can earn compared to the average full time pay in their organisation. I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or risk takers; I'm talking about the executives of public limited companies and larger private companies. These aren't people who've had brilliant ideas, or risked everything to create lots of new wealth.  They're much likely to have climbed greasy corporate poles through a combination of genuine ability and the skill to play the corporate game.  I'm happy for them to earn lots of money, but not the vast sums they currently do. There's plenty of literature on the subject of how the multiple of the pay of CEOs has risen from (roughly) 20 times the median pay of an employee in the 1950s, to well over (roughly) 200 times today.  I'm not sure what I'd set it at, but I'm sure that given the right data I could come up with a figure. 
   
   Aside from creating a slightly more equitable feel in the job market, this would also create an incentive to raise the average pay of employees.  We might find that the key workers currently risking their health for £10 an hour move towards earning £15 an hour. Not life-changing, but certainly more comfortable, especially when coupled with:
   
2. Moving towards a Land Value Tax as the primary source of tax receipts.  Making the move to this would be difficult and complicated, but then our existing system of taxation is difficult and complicated.  (If you don't know what Land Value Tax is the best thing to do rather than me try to explain it is go to this link: http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/). But post-Covid, there are going to be historically-enormous levels of debt that will need to start to be repaid. Increasing existing taxes on income on profits are going to discourage economic activity just at the point when it's going to be needed more than ever before, so let's move to a system which at worst will keep those taxes level, and in time would I believe have the potential to reduce them, while keeping the revenues we'll need to not slash public expenditure.  Aside from the economic benefits, I think a Land Value Tax, if done properly, would again help to create some genuine sense of "we're all in this together".
   
3. Shunning Chinese-made products.  Say what you like about Donald Trump (and most people do), but he's seen China as the major global threat for many years now, and I agree with him. A combination of their brutal domestic politics and policies, hideous human rights violations, and shameless stealing of intellectual property just make them a nation we shouldn't be doing business with (and that was before their cultural practices unleashed Covid on us). So we shouldn't.  I'm personally going to do my damndest to avoid anything manufactured in China, and I'd be supportive of, if not an outright ban on Chinese imports, high tariffs at the very least. And if that makes us worse off economically, so be it. The government can start by reversing its Huawei/5G decision. 

There's much more the government will need to do in its post-Covid (essentially a post-war) settlement with the UK population, and I'll cover that next time.

Covid-19: preventing deaths is not the top priority

I'm being good, I really am.  No unnecessary journeys or contact with others.  Choosing to exercise either very early or in the shed.  Washing my hands.  No panic buying.  Being one of the 700,000+ Good Samaritan volunteers.

And yet, and yet....something troubles me about all of this, and it's not just the police forces who seem to be delighting in their new powers (Derbyshire, Humberside - yes, I mean you, though I'm sure there are plenty of others), nor the people calling the police to report their neighbour going for a second daily jog, worrying though those things are.

It's more than that.  It's understanding that though we're being presented with the current measures and restrictions as a reaction to a public health crisis, that's only the first, and least important part of the story.  Those restrictions are essentially a political response to Covid-19, designed to maintain public order and the fabric of society.  I'm not saying that's wrong, merely that it shows that all deaths are not equal.  I'm also not saying it's a UK issue, nor even one of liberal democracies. It applies the world over, in all kinds of regimes.

Here's how I see it.  The latest modelling - which may or may not be accurate - is suggesting the UK may have 5,700 deaths as a result of the virus, two-thirds of whom are people likely to be in the last year of their life.  That feels a bit low to me based on current trends, so let's double it, and say there will be 12,000 deaths, a third of which will be people who otherwise wouldn't have died any time soon.  That's 4,000 new, avoidable deaths.  Let's say we didn't have the current restrictions in place, and as a result that rate was 10 times higher, at 40,000 deaths.

Shocking, right?  Hard to imagine.  Coffins everywhere. But as a number it's dwarfed by the number of officially recorded avoidable deaths in a typical year, as defined and recorded by the Office of National Statistics. The year for which the most recent numbers exist show that by the ONS's own definition, 31,000 women and 56,000 men died from what it calls "avoidable mortality" (treatable and infectious diseases, accidents, suicides, drug use etc.).  So in a 'normal' year, we have double the number of avoidable deaths that we'd suffer even in an extreme version of the Covid modelling.

For Covid, in addition to the restrictions on personal freedom, we're essentially crashing our economy for the foreseeable future, and creating debt that I think will take at least a century to pay off.  (Did you know we only paid the last of our WW2 debts off in 2006? [to the US]). For all other avoidable deaths, however, it's business-as-usual. 

What's the difference?  To use a horrible modern term, it's the 'optics'.  Most avoidable deaths are relatively unseen; we might hear about a death on the roads, or someone taking their own life, or someone else whose cancer was discovered too late, and think that while each one is a tragedy, it's no cause to fundamentally change what we do as a society. They're drip-fed doses of the reality of modern life.  But there's no moral difference between our reaction to Covid and what could be our reaction to the regular avoidable deaths.  Roads could be engineered and rules applied to massively reduce deaths on them.  The funding for mental health services could be expanded massively for the at-risk.  Everybody could go through very regular screening that would discover most cancers at an early, treatable stage.  But those things don't happen, by-and-large. Governments of all hues maintain a relatively balanced view of the political and economic drivers of policy.  Deaths still happen, but fewer than with no government intervention, and more than if every resource were focused on stopping them. But they happen evenly, in chronological and geographical terms, making them unremarkable other than to the poor souls affected and their families and friends.

Covid is unlikely to be like that however - there would be a massive spike in avoidable deaths, and we'd see pictures like the ones emerging from Italy and Spain, of rows and rows of coffins, of hospitals that couldn't cope with the numbers, and people dying from want of treatment.  And that would trigger in all likelihood political and societal upheaval; unrest, riots, other crime. So governments are taking action to manage that.  I'm not saying they're wrong or irrational to do it.

But what I am saying is that we need to recognise our own inconsistencies, our own lack of understanding of what goes on in the world normally, and how essentially fear of our reaction to extra deaths is driving government policy across the globe.  That policy may, as I say, be a rational reaction to address the risk of society fracturing, but let's recognise that it's our irrationality, our lack of awareness, and our inability to truly assess risk, that are driving the formulation and implementation of the policy right now.  So let's not ask whether governments are doing enough to address the threat from the virus, but whether we, in fact, are doing enough to spread the knowledge and rational thinking we're going to need in the future - because if something like Covid recurs in the next 20 years, we will be truly screwed from an economic point of view, and be sufficiently serious that it might generate the kind of societal breakdown the authorities are working so hard to avoid at the moment.

PC pc

I wanted to be a policeman when I was a little boy.  It seemed glamorous and worthy at the same time. Even as a student and then in the first years of work I looked into the possibility of joining up, but on each occasion my short-sightedness counted against me.  While I'm not particularly authoritarian, the existence of a large unarmed force, keeping the peace by popular consent rather than through power and coercion, has seemed something the UK should be legitimately proud of. I'm instinctively on the police's side.

In recent years that instinct has been challenged by a succession of events. I recognise that the list that follows probably represents a tiny fraction of overall policing activity, and that the vast majority of rank-and-file coppers are as embarrassed about it as their high-ups are pleased with it, but these have been the things that have come to represent the modern British police:

- being late to act (if at all) on grooming gangs
- taking the word of a fantasist (who later turned out to be a paedophile) at face value when he was incriminating innocent people
- allowing Extinction Rebellion to engage in acts of vandalism and civil disobediance
- a senior officer locking himself in his car and exiting the scene while one of his officers was dying from a stab wound (the Westminster attack)
- policing "hate speech" on the internet (where there clearly was no incitement to hatred or violence)
- actively participating in, rather than merely policing, Pride events.

In other words, in my eyes, they've had some bad PR. And the thing that links all the above (excepting perhaps the disgraceful Westminster episode) - the adoption and holding of a particular 'liberal' (though in reality it's nothing of the sort) set of political views.

Despite all the above, when I found out at Christmas that there was no age limit these days on who could apply to join the Special Constabulary (the part-time, unpaid police; but still 'proper' police, unlike PCSOs), I thought I'd give it a go.

That application culminated in a face-to-face interview last Friday at Cheshire Police's HQ.  The interview was conducted by 2 people; one female who was about 25 and was described as an "HR assistant", and 1 male in his early 30s who gave me his name but not his role.  The conduct of the interview was slightly odd in my view - each of the interviewers literally read from a script both at the start and end of the process, and the interview itself consisted of me being asked 5 pre-formulated questions.  Aside from the question of whether interviews as a technique actually are a valid prediction of how someone will perform in a role, and the rather odd atmosphere that prevailed because of the scripting, I'll share the 5 questions I was asked (the wording may be slightly different as I'm writing this from memory, but I'm not too far away):

Q1. Describe a difficult situation that you have faced, and how you went about addressing it.
Q2. Your sergeant wants you to find out the problems that your community faces. How would you go out about doing this?
Q3. Describe a problem where you had several options open to you - how did you assess each one and decide what to do?
Q4. You witness a senior colleague making an inappropriate response to a female colleague at work, which leaves her visibly upset. What do you do in that situation?
Q5. Thinking about a difficult challenge in your life - what did you do to be able to cope?

That was it. Bear in mind this was an application to be a policeman, my view would be that questions 1 and 3 are legitimate - they, if followed up properly, would give an insight into my thought processes, and Q5 may potentially say something about my resilience. But questions 2 and 4? Take Q4 - it may be of some relevance to, for example, my attitude to authority and whether I'm likely to turn a blind eye too readily, but this is one of the key things you want to ask me, really?

And that's the important thing - what these questions don't cover. Where are the questions that truly test my judgement in a policing situation?  That properly assess my motivation for wanting to join the force?  That ask how I'd make time to do this role alongside my current job?  That seek insight into my judgement and common sense? Or my negotiation and pacifying abilities?  En masse, they're a pathetic, politically-driven, standardised set of questions that in my view elicit virtually nothing about how a decent plod would do his or her job.

I suspected trouble was brewing after the end of my answer to question 2 - the one about "problems in the community".  I waffled on for a bit about community representatives and blah blah, and at the end of my answer I was - they were momentarily off-script, goodness me - prompted to name some specific people I should be engaging with. I hadn't a clue how to supplement what I'd already said, and pretty much said so.

It wasn't, therefore, a massive surprise to be turned down. Frankly, I was neither surprised nor disappointed. If those are the questions against which they decide whether to let me in the club, I don't want to be a member of their club, to disfigure a classic Groucho Marx-ism.  I can absolutely see the thread that links my interview questions to the appalling senior management police misjudgements over the last few years.  It's borne of a political view of the world (not necessarily party political) that has abandoned any sensible assessment of the amount of disutility particular crimes cause, and treats them accordingly, and instead attaches a political value to them - hence being offensive to transsexuals on the internet warrants more police time than investigating a burglary.  It's ironic that the principle of preventing crime by walking the beat now seems to apply more to offensive things in the virtual world rather than horrible ones in the real world.

Maybe it's best they turned me down. Maybe I'm too old, too old-fashioned, too socially-conservative, too intolerant. Perhaps their interview questions were, in that context, right on-the-money, and did the job they were supposed to.  In which case, good for them. But it makes me fearful for the future.  The people who manage to answer these questions properly are the people keeping us safe. I'm sure a sensible few will manage to game the system and get through, but it's worrying that the others will be unthinking, right-on, amoral idiots.